Obama administration closing in on rules to let NSA share more freely with FBI, CIA

New rules have been in the works since 2008 and may be approved in “months.”

The New York Times is reporting that Obama administration officials are close to agreeing on new rules that would allow the National Security Agency (NSA) to share surveillance information more freely with other federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, without scrubbing Americans’ identifying information first.

In 2008, President George W. Bush put forth an executive order that said such a change to the rules governing sharing between agencies could occur when procedures had been put in place. When the Obama administration took over, it started "quietly developing a framework” to carry out the proposed change in 2009, according to the Times.

For the past decade, the NSA has collected massive amounts of phone metadata, e-mail, and other information from a variety of sources—sometimes directly from the companies that make such communication possible, sometimes through overseas taps on lines that connect to data centers outside of the US. Currently when an agency wants information on a foreign citizen, it requests that data from the NSA, and the NSA theoretically scrubs it of any incidental references to American citizens who are not being targeted. This process is known as “minimization.”

"The new system would permit analysts at other intelligence agencies to obtain direct access to raw information from the NSA’s surveillance to evaluate for themselves,” the Times reported. Minimization would then theoretically happen at the agency level.

Already, a variety of agencies have access to raw data that’s collected by the NSA under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which encompasses information from any wire based on American soil. But the new guidelines would give those agencies access to the rest of the NSA’s expansive purview.

The general counsel for the office of the Director of National Intelligence, Robert Litt, confirmed to the Times that the Obama administration had a 21-page draft outlining the new procedures. However, Litt declined to share the draft with the paper. The changes can be implemented without Congressional approval, according to Reagan-era Executive Order 12333. The Obama administration reportedly sought input last month from the five-person Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (which has drawn criticism in the past from civil liberties leaders for approving surveillance measures pushed by Obama), and the draft will have to be approved by Intelligence Director James Clapper, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.

Ultimately, the goal is to give federal agencies leeway to trawl through NSA data to find worthwhile leads. "That also means more officials will be looking at private messages—not only foreigners’ phone calls and e-mails that have not yet had irrelevant personal information screened out, but also communications to, from, or about Americans that the NSA’s foreign intelligence programs swept in incidentally,” the Times writes.

Much of the NSA’s practices have been kept secret, and what we know about the state of surveillance in America is in large part due to leaked documents released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Since the revelation of those documents in 2013, the Obama Administration ostensibly moved to limit the NSA’s powers but ultimately decided on a new program that would essentially just force telecommunications companies to keep metadata and supply it to the NSA on demand. So far, however, the judicial system has allowed the NSA to keep its original system of collecting information in place.

The Times reported that the new guidelines could go into effect in "months."